LG's 3D aspirations are one step closer today with the announcement that they've licensed multi-core processors for their digital TVs.

The Korean company now has access to both graphics and central processing units from ARM, the archeitecture of which is suited to improved multitasking, Adobe Flash acceleration, cleaner 1080p resolution and the kind of power to crunch the numbers necessary for 3DTV.

The chips will allow the sets full web interactivity including video-on-demand, e-commerce, social networking, voting and whatever other kinds of widgets you care to chuck at it plus, of course, the Flash favourites like YouTube and iPlayer straight to your big screen. And all of that without a set top box.

Normally associated with mobile phones, ARM will supply processors running at 1GHz and are looking to develop smarter technology to save even more power further down the line.

All in all, it's a good move for LG, helping their panels take a step up in quality and begin to match the top players in the field. Look out for a similar move in exterior design some time soon.

Short Version

Name: Philips Cinema 21:9

Type: 56" superwidescreen LCD TV

Specs:

• Dynamic contrast - 80,000:1
• Resolution - Full HD (2560 x 1080p)
• Response Time - 1ms
• Frame Rate - 200Hz
• Viewing Angle - 176º vertical and horizontal
• Connectivity - 4 x HDMI 1.3, 2 x Scart, USB, Ethernet, Wi-Fi 802.11g
• Speakers - 2 x subwoofers, 2 x dome tweeters
• Features - Net TV, Ambilight, Pixel Perfect Engine, Anti-reflective glass

How much should it cost?: £3,500

Should I buy it?: The short answer is yes. It doesn't represent great value and the picture isn't as perfect as the money sounds but it's an awesome TV. You're paying the extra for the unique design and the swaggering step of an early adopter.

I'm not going to tell you this is the world's best TV. It isn't. It's got a pretty modest contrast ratio of 1,300:1 and a lot of people will tell you that contrast is the most important feature of any panel. However, it's very hard to complain when the 42" Technika LCD42-910 only costs you 500 pounds.

It's a stylishly slim 6cm deep, without the stand, which is probably where you're getting the best value, but don't ignore the fact that it's got a very healthy 100Hz frame rate and a response time time of just 8ms, so you're unlikely to suffer from ghosting, blurring and juddering picture problems.

It is a 1080p resolution picture, so provided you're watching through an HD box or Blu-ray or such, you will be getting Full HD viewing. Technika doesn't' even stiff you round the back either with four HDMI sockets.

Tesco has reduced the set by 200 pounds and, so long as you can live with the compromised colour palate, then it could well be time to get your wallet out.

Buy it here

In an interview with OLED Info, Won Kim, LG's vice president of OLED sales and marketing, confirmed that the electronics conglomerate will be releasing a 15-inch OLED TV in its native Korea in December 2009 - January 2010. Kim went on to say that a global roll-out will follow.

Last month we told you how Sony are planning to release a 21-inch OLED TV at around the same time as LG are predicting their 15-inch release. Samsung and Panasonic are both aiming for 40-inch versions during 2010 as well. It seems like the competition in the OLED market is really hotting up.

Kim also hinted that LG have not completely dismissed the notion of OLED screens on their mobile phones as has been recently speculated. He said that two phones had been tailored in Korea with OLED screens and stated that "OLED phones will not only survive entrenched LCD ones but position as a premium segment".

(via OLED Info)

YouTube yesterday launched it's new multi-platform version of its website, YouTubeXL, designed to bring YouTube content your big screen PC or TV.

The new site is basically an oversized redesign of the current website, minus; comments, adds and other common web-frippery. It's meant to look and work like a native app, but actually it looks and feels like a Fisher-Price website.

The content is hard to move through and the colours of the site are quite jarring. High Quality and HD videos aren't available on it either, which seems like a ridiculous omission for a service that's aimed at large-screen computers and TVs.

The one good thing about XL is that it'll work in anything that's got a browser, so you'll be able to use your PS3 and Wii to watch YouTube videos on your TV.

Not all of YouTube's content will be available immediately on XL, but with Hulu launching it's native app stateside this week YouTubeXL will need to pull its socks up if it wants to win the web-TV war.

Don't get me wrong, YouTube is brilliant for just this reason, but I'm not sure XL knows what it is.

(Via Tech Crunch)

We knew it was coming in June but now we now exactly when you can fork out for the Philips Cinema 21:9 TV. 18th June is the date to jam in your diaries and you'd better put in some serious overtime because you'll need a rather icy cool £4,500 to get one in the UK. The good news is that we do have the full details on the 56-inch dream machine so you can at least drool if not afford.

It runs a full 2560x1080p HD resolution making for a grand total of 8.3 million pixels, each controlled by the Philips Perfect Pixel HD engine. It offers a 200Hz frame rate - as well it should - response times of just under 1ms and a contrast ratio of 80,000:1. Oh, and before we have a bunch of nay-sayers jumping in, there's some smart tech to resize your 16:9 pictures without significantly distorting the images or leaving black bars all over the place.

Large OLED TVs will be a reality by the end of the year with a raft more to follow in 2010. But one does feel compelled to ask, what's the bleeding point, if a 21 inch model costs upward of £5000? I don't care if you're Garry Gadget, surely for that money, any sane person would buy a 65 inch HD Plasma with enough change left over to buy a 22 inch HD LCD.

Seiko Epson Corporation today announced it has developed inkjet technology that allows for the uniform deposition of organic material in the production of large-screen OLED televisions. This goes a long way to resolving the uneven layering that had previously hindered the mass-scale production of large screen OLED TVs.

But it looks like it might be Sony who is the first to release a large-screen OLED TV after demoing a 21 inch model at the Flat Panel Expo in Japan, with Samsung releasing a 31 inch or 40 inch model soon thereafter.

OLED looks to be the future of TV, with wide viewing angles, amazing richness and depth and blacks that would make the even 3am look positively luminescent, but at prices that would make even the most spendthrifty wince it might be a while yet before an OLED panel makes its way into everyone's homes.

(Via Akihabara News)

Twitter is hitting our TV screens as the Samsung Internet@TV service embraces the world of microblogging. Now, to begin with my inner monologue went something like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah," as it has done with all the widget TV nonsense since CES 2009 but actually this is completely brilliant.

You're going to be watching TV with your mates at all times. Lonely nights in are a thing of the past. You can watch the box with people all over the country. Imagine the mass slaggings during reality TV; the awesome virtual mayhem through football games? Samsung, this is a stroke of genius. Great way to get around expensive premium rate phone calls for audience interactivity too.

The service is available NOW on Samsung LED 6000, 7000 and 8000 series televisions, and 6 and 7 series LCD screens too. Go use and make merry.

Samsung

Panasonic has decided that enough is enough and with Sony and Samsung looking to the future, it's time to get busy living or get busy dying. To put that in a slightly clearer way, they're going to start making OLED TVs too.

Pana's decided, and quite rightly, that OLED is the TV of next Tuesday, so they're teaming up with fellow Japanese company Sumitomo Chemical to design develop and manufacture a 40" OLED by 2010, which gives them 18 months and counting to come good on their word. Good luck with that.

It's excellent news for all fans of OLED tech out there, myself very much included, but, even if they do pull it off, I suspect it'll still be many more years before someone makes an OLED that anyone can actually afford.

In an attempt to charge their advertisers more for their content without pissing off viewers too much, Sky is launching a 'green button' service for advertising. Much like the red button service that lets people find out more information about a program, the green button will enable 'extended advertising content'.

Advertisers will be able to encourage users to press the green button during a trail, and it'll take them to a location where they'll be able to find out more, or watch an extended version of the advert. It could even feature entirely new footage.

Warner Brothers will be trialling the new technology for the upcoming release of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, and a campaign for T-Mobile will also be live from launch.

But why would anyone ever use it? Except in a few cases, like the Superbowl, most people regard adverts as a necessary evil to get the content they want. Unless companies used this service very imaginatively, then I can't see viewers really getting too excited about this one.

(via Brandrepublic)

Here's a no-brainer for you with them both stuck next to each other on the BBC News page. On the one hand, iPlayer is going HD today. On the other, we're going to see Adobe Flash chips in TV sets and set-top boxes.

Now seeing as iPlayer, and YouTube for that matter, are both Flash based, it looks as if live broadcast TV is taking another step towards an ultimate demise. The issue before, as far as I'm concerned was that the likes of iPlayer and the Tube were too hideously pixelated and rubbish to ever watch on the big screen but in full resolution, there'll be nothing left to stop them.

So far, they'll be no Adobe love for the likes of Sony and Samsung but we should be looking at 420 million bits and pieces of hardware as made by Broadcom, Intel, NXP and STMicroelectronics within the next three years. Worth having a little think before you buy AV.

What are the considerations when you buy an HD TV? Well, the first thing to note is that if you're buying something new, it's actually hard not to buy an High Definition set of some sort but, of course, there are a lot of different types of HD and lots of different panels out there, so how do you know which one's for you?

HD Content

Probably the most important thing to know is how much HD content do you want to watch and how much will you be able to. There's actually not a hell of a lot of full 1080p HD content out there at the moment.

Sky broadcasts the most at the moment with 36 channels in full HD including BBC HD, all the sports channels and some film channels too. HD programs take up a hell of lot of bandwidth to beam out to people's homes but Sky can do that because it's a satellite platform and you can send a hell of a lot of information between satellite dishes.

So, if you've got Sky already and you want to get HD programming, then you're in luck. All you'll need to do is buy your HDTV, plug it in as usual and Bob's you uncle, HD in your living room.

Your only other options for HD broadcasts right now Virgin who has just the one HD channel in the shape of BBC HD and Freesat, the free, non-subscription based satellite service from the BBC and ITV. There is a set up charge in that you'll need a satellite nailed to the roof of your house and you'll need a decoder box or a Freesat tuner built-into your TV too but, otherwise, it's free. At the moment they have just two HD channels - BBC HD and ITV HD - but they have the potential and ambition for a hell of a lot more.

Something like Freeview, on the other hand, currently offers no HD programming and, although they say that they're going to offer up to four, that's really as much as they'll ever have. The reason is that, unlike Sky and Freesat, they're not a satellite system. They use a certain portion of the electromagentic spectrum just like radio but they don't have very much bandwidth to play with, so, as it stands, they'll never be able to offer much in the way of HD.

LG and Freesat have put there heads together for the last few months and finally come up with a product for the consumer to get his and hers hands on. The LF7700 LCD range will come in 32", 37", 42" and 47" panel sizes and is slightly confusingly both 1080p and described as HD Ready.

LG say it's HD ready because of the built-in Freesat tuner such that all you need is a satellite dish to receive HD content unlike other TVs that would require a set top box of some sort.

The LF7700 comes with a generous 4 HDMI 1.3 ports, an Ethernet connection and a USB slot as well as speakers tuned by the legendary Mark Levinson. It offers a dynamic contrast ratio of 50,000:1, TruMotion 100Hz frame rates for a smoother picture in the two largest panel sizes and the LG intelligent sensor which allows the backlighting of the LCD to adjust accroding to ambient light and so save the user power consumption and planet its carbon.

They're available from the end of this month and start from around £570.

LG / Freesat

CES 2009 set the tempo for TV tech for the year. Whether intentionally or not, you could more or less have switched one manufacturer's speech for another only with a different company logo behind them.

On the one hand, the global recession was a factor and, on the other, environmental meltdown. What this meant in consumer tech terms was that you could connect all new TVs to the internet; each company has a cleaner, greener way of putting their sets together and that no one showed off the new world's biggest panel.

For us, we now have a sea of widget TV interfaces to work through until we've found the one that suits us best and a marsh of greenwashing shpeel to wade through until we can see if these machines will either save a) the planet, b) our wallets, or ideally, c) all of the above.

So when Sony invited the UK techno-scribblers to have a look at their 2009 Bravia range, I simply couldn't refuse the excellent opportunity to stand in front of some panels scowling and pretending to be much less impressed than I actually am. Love that shit.

OLED technology may be about to take a massive leap forwards, which is good news for anyone looking to the screens becoming more widely used. The blue OLED has always been the weak link in the screens, offering significantly shorter lifespans than its red and green brethren. Well, a team from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is one step closer to cracking the problem by improving blue efficiency by an impressive 25%.

The breakthrough was made via new host materials for a blue phosphorescent OLED. Other than the alleged 25% improvement in efficiency, there's not a lot more to tell at this point however, and we'll have to play the waiting game. The PNNL scientists are rumoured to be discussing their findings ahead of meeting the American Chemical society later this spring, so hopefully we'll have more to tell then.

Now I know the image I've used isn't very accurate but a) it's far more dramatic than some black rectangle of a LG plasma and b) I was going to use this one instead but, seeing as it's a Samsung and an LCD, that would have been just as ridiculous as this one which, as it goes, is much more interesting, don't you think?

Anyway, my editorial dilemmas to one side, the point is that LG's vice president, Lee Gyu-hong, has announced that the Korean giants are taking a bit of a beating on plasma TVs and that they're thinking about ceasing production.

Yeah, not a lot I can really add to that header. It rather says it all.

Basically, in layman's terms, what we're looking at here, is that the super widescreen Philips Cinema 21:9 LCD TV, right, well, that's going to be available, as in, to buy and stuff, for €4000, ok, which is the currency that a lot people are using right now in mainland Europe and happens to be worth far too close to a pound for most people's liking, and that's going to happen in June, which is the sixth month of the year just before July. And after May.

Sadly, as lovely as it is, unless the UK econmony pulls a giant U-turn or I win the lottery, or Philips goes bust and has a fire sale, I don't think I'll be getting one. Do write in and gloat if you're rich and have already marked out the space on your wall.

Philips

NEC is to demo some concept tech over in the heart of Barcelona at MWC in just over a week's time. Their brainwave is to put 3D technology onto the 3.1" screen of a mobile phone.

It's a prototype which they've been working on since the beginning of last year and, naturally, it doesn't require glasses to view. No word as whether your head has to be in the right place for it to work but I can't see how it could be possible otherwise.

Project Kangaroo, the planned online telly service that would've combined BBC, ITV and Channel 4 content on one handy site for your viewing pleasure, has been binned.

The EVIL denier of free TV is the Competition Commission which has, incredibly, decided that it would be unfair of the Beeb, ITV and C4 to team up as this might damage rival commercial companies that operating in the same "space" - despite the fact that the rival commercial companies routinely allow their users to steal BBC's, ITV's and Channel 4's content, whack their own advertising over it and pass it off as their own...

News of the Philips Cinema 21:9 TV splatted out onto the web about two weeks earlier than the Dutch masters would have liked, so the event yesterday afternoon was always going to be a little underwhelming. All the same, we sent Susi down to brave the canapes and bring us back what few extra details Philips were prepared to share, as well as a little footage of the sucker too.

Well, naturally, it's only really going to be ace when viewing stuff in true widescreen but then I love film, love it and that's the kind of TV that a rich version of me would buy. What about you? Let's say you're completely cashed up. What screen would you have? Let me know in the comments and then we can all fight when everyone disagrees.

Philips

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